Exodus leaves San Jose wastewater plant shorthanded

SAN JOSE -- A rash of resignations driven by recent pay and benefit cuts has left San Jose's massive wastewater treatment plant severely short-handed, raising the risk of a catastrophic sewage spill and forcing the city to pay top dollar for contract workers and overtime staff to keep it running, according to an audit Friday and a department report.

"Fewer people with less experience are now working more hours to operate and maintain the plant," the city auditor reported, citing below-market compensation as a "major catalyst" in employee departures.

The Water Pollution Control Plant, known at City Hall as the WPCP or "Weepy Seepy," dates to 1956 and provides wastewater treatment for 1.4 million residents and 17,000 businesses in San Jose, Santa Clara, Milpitas, Campbell, Saratoga, Los Gatos and Monte Sereno. Last year the San Jose City Council approved a $2.1 billion long-term plan to modernize the aging plant.

The audit noted that a plant failure would "imperil public health and safety" with raw sewage flowing directly into the bay or backing up and overflowing through the sewer network into streets and streams.

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The plant has lost 90 workers -- 43 percent of its workforce -- in the past three years, according to a city management report that said the shortage has required costly overtime for remaining employees. The City Council on Tuesday is expected to consider another pricey short-term staffing solution: Hiring contract workers.

City officials said they had anticipated a wave of retirements, but compensation cuts driven by the city's budget deficits have accelerated staff departures, and they have found it hard to recruit replacements for jobs in high demand statewide. The city cut employee compensation 10 percent -- mostly in salary and health benefits -- to reduce job losses from budget deficits driven by rising retirement benefit costs. Voters also approved a June measure to reduce pension benefits.

The plant predicament comes as no surprise to the city's workers and union leaders who had protested that pay and benefit cuts to patch budget deficits would only drive out skilled workers and imperil the public services they provide.

"We tried to explain to them that this was what was going to happen," said Daniel Finn, who quit his job as a city diesel operator and mechanic at the plant last year because the pay and benefit cuts "didn't make it feasible to work for the city anymore."

"Now I have another job where I make more money and have better working conditions working right here in San Jose," said Finn of his current job with a private company.

While the city has saved millions of dollars outsourcing low-skill janitorial, park maintenance and graffiti cleanup work in recent years, hiring skilled industrial electrician and control technician contractors to run the plant won't come cheap.

The proposed contract with the only qualified bidder, Telstar Instruments of Concord, that's up for council consideration Tuesday calls for hiring up to three industrial electricians and six instrument control technicians over the next two years. The total annual rate for salary, benefits and overhead would come to $270,400 each for the electricians and $239,200 each for the instrument control technicians.

That's about 30 percent higher than the city's total cost for its own instrument control technicians and 46 percent higher than for its electricians, said Ashwini Kantak, an assistant city manager overseeing the plant. And the higher cost is largely due to management overhead and profit.

Both pay rates and benefit costs for Telstar's instrument technicians are lower than the city's, but Telstar's overhead and profit markup is 285 percent compared to a 40 percent city overhead markup, Kantak said.

"It's a terrible deal for San Jose taxpayers," said Ben Field, chief of staff at the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, which has criticized city's outsourcing.

The plant is funded by sewer fees paid by homeowners and businesses. Rates have risen sharply in recent years to cover anticipated plant improvement costs.

For now, at least, the city appears to have little choice on staffing. Only four companies bid to provide plant workers, and the city dismissed the three others as not responsive to its needs. Even Telstar wasn't able to provide two of the needed positions, plant operators and mechanics.

Kantak said the city is exploring longer-term options such as higher salaries, retention bonuses and training programs to ensure it can maintain plant staffing.

"This is not ideal," Kantak said. "Everybody is having difficulty attracting people. We're competing for scarce resources and need to make sure we're competitive."

But Finn said the city should have done more to keep the workers it had.

"I know they were hurting and needed to make cuts," Finn said. "But I think they went about it the wrong way."